DigitalDihua

The main Visual Graphic was designed for the Digital Di-Hau exhibition which was invited by the Taipei city government to re-activate the old Di-hau district with multiple events. To pixelate the photo of a City God gives a digitalized quality of the traditional sculpture which made a perfect cross-over transition between old and new. According to the brightness of the image, the darker the more fractal effect was applied to that particular pixel. Following this principle, a series of images with different colors were generated as a main visual graphic for the poster and flyer.

The paired Stone Lions are traditional sculptures commonly located in front of the palaces, the temples, the gardens, or the houses to symbolize not only power and dignitary, and also guardians to protect the country, the family, or the properties from the invasion of evil, illness or enemies. Here, this pixelating approach was applied to give the lion sculptures new digital re-births. By using the visual coding tools, the Grasshopper in 3D modeling software called Rhinoceros, it is relatively easier to pixelate 3D complex shapes than before. The 2 larger Stone Lions were generated slightly different in accordance with their orientation. One stayed in an orthogonal setting while the other was given a 45-degree angle to make the difference. These one pair of lions were located closer to the front door of the exhibition space to keep the conventional meaning of “protection”. The other 44 smaller ones were placed onto the wall referring to a tongue twister titled in Mandarin as “sìshísì zhi shíshiz (44 Stone Lions)”.

The “Autumn/ The Falling Leaves”, is a wooden panel engraved and cut through with various leaf-like patterns by the laser cutter. The wooden screen inspired by a traditional Chinese furniture is called “PingFeng”. The “PingFeng” was commonly used as a partition or a folding wall to change the usage and the division of a larger space. In this particular project, the “Grasshopper” as a plug-in of Rhinoceros was used as a pattern generating machine in accordance with numerous random points on the panel. In other words, by manipulating the points’ locations, different patterns will be generated accordingly.